Copycat

by Gillian White

  The little I had confessed to Martha – my growing dependence, my jealousy – only made her more anxious about me. She agreed that this state was unnatural and became as keen as I was to sort something out. Laughingly, she once called it a crush and when I wailingly disagreed, ‘It’s far more powerful than that,’ she told me she thought there was nothing more powerful than that adolescent first passion. ‘There was this boy called David Fuller. Jesus, I used to give him money. Horrid, spotty little bugger.’

  ‘I just hope it doesn’t last,’ I said, still hoping for an answer, as if this was thrush or cystitis to be looked up in the Well Woman’s Guide.

  ‘These things mostly burn themselves out,’ she decided, rattling ice cubes with nonchalance.

  But that was nine years ago, so obviously she was wrong.

  Sometimes, horrified that I’d told her too much, I wondered if Martha had spoken to Sam. And what if this got back to Graham? He wouldn’t begin to understand. But no, Martha wouldn’t tell Sam. They didn’t swap news like we did and she’d know that Sam would snigger, and he was indiscreet in his cups. No, I felt fairly safe that Martha would keep my sickness to herself.

  We should never have discussed it, because after I’d let those first feelings out my behaviour began to deteriorate. I had thought she might make concessions.

  Her friendships were increasingly hard to bear.

  I begrudged any interests that excluded me.

  And my excuse for my moody behaviour was that tired and meaningless phrase, ‘But, Martha, you don’t understand.’

  It’s a wonder it took her so long to hate me. I was walking on dangerous ground.

  Once again, as in childhood, I grasped at weird straws, wishing that something dramatic would happen so that Martha, a fat woman with holes in her tights, would make a fuss, would notice me. If our house burned down, if Poppy was ill, if Graham crashed his car… Nothing fatal, of course, just enough to get Martha’s undivided attention, so she would spend more time round at my house – or, better still, me at hers.

  So that in the end I began to will it, and if Graham was late home from work I would look at my watch and start hoping…

  And if Poppy had a temperature, I would dip the thermometer in warm water to send it up a degree or two before I rushed over to show it to Martha.

  Oh yes, yes, I did these things.

  And this was ME, such a dull and middling, straightforward person. ME. A frump. The mother of such an adorable child. Reduced to this. If anyone had told me this would happen, I would have laughed in their faces. You flick through stuff like this in the hairdresser’s: I MARRIED A ONE-LEGGED MONSTER; MY BABY WAS NOT MY BABY; I WATCHED MY MOTHER KILL MY FATHER; I FELL IN LOVE WITH MY NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOUR.

  I hid my face in my hands and wept.

  And I couldn’t begin to know, at this stage, how bad this was going to get.

  EIGHT

  Martha

  AND I COULDN’T BEGIN to know, at this stage, how bad this was going to get.

  There was something fishy behind the idea: why would Jennie, of all people, want a pool in her garden when she could barely swim? On our Italian holiday her crab-like breaststroke only just kept her buoyant. If waves lapped at her chin she panicked.

  She was disturbed. I suspected her motives and went round feeling guilty for being so damned uncharitable.

  She hugged her knees gleefully. ‘Just think about it,’ she enthused. ‘Just imagine. The kids can turn into water babies while we spend the summer getting tanned, and think how good you’ll feel with some exercise.’

  Oh yes, I could well imagine, and saw myself stranded beside Jennie’s pool, having to use it to prevent confrontations which were gradually turning more bitter. It seemed that she would do anything to tempt me from going back to work.

  And now this.

  I prayed that Graham would see sense. The kids were too young, the weather in this country doesn’t merit that kind of expense and, above all, no matter what you do, a pool in the garden attracts hectic swimmers. Kids. New ‘friends’. Pushy neighbours. And the mess.

  My prayers, as usual, went unanswered. I think God had sussed me out by then – I was not a dependable fan. Graham thought a pool might cheer Jennie up. She was expert at getting round him and I wished I could learn that knack for myself.

  ‘Everyone will be able to help,’ Jennie went on, eager-faced, quite pretty, and all smiles for a change. ‘We’ll start after Christmas. A joint project!’

  Even in those days I had to tread carefully. ‘You can say goodbye to your precious privacy. Think of the swarms of people in your garden. Wet towels, wet floors, litter. Everyone using your lav. And the racket. My mum’s got one. They’re hard work.’

  Out of everyone I had ever known, out of everyone I’d ever heard of, the thought of Jennie playing hostess to a mass of wet fleshy bodies dripping their way hither and thither across her carpets was the most unlikely. The most ludicrous. She would not survive the ordeal.

  The casual way our own house was used as playground, free pub and women’s collective set Jennie’s teeth on edge. So for her to turn the tables in such a perverse way was a worrying signal of how far she was prepared to go.

  So, damn the consequences, I faced her head on. ‘I’m not going to play your mind games, Jennie. We both know what’s behind this idea and you’re crazy if you honestly think that a pool would make the slightest difference to me wanting to work. If I wanted a pool, I’d build one myself.’

  She flashed me the falsest of bright smiles. ‘Martha! You’re so self-obsessed, it’s incredible.’

  OK, OK. Perhaps I was neurotic. After all, a pool was an excessive move in the small game Jennie was playing. Maybe the idea would die a death after Christmas. Jennie would surely be cured by then and we could all get back to normal.

  ‘Love thy neighbour’.

  That Christmas was a blighted occasion. It should have been one of the best, with Poppy and Scarlett at two and a bit, perfect for tinsel and Father Christmas and sacks and reindeers and babies in mangers.

  Poor Jennie suffered miserably with Graham’s parents, Ruth and Howard, and her own purse-lipped mother, Stella, for a week.

  When she told me they’d invited themselves, I said, ‘No way! Tell them you just can’t cope, what with Poppy and a baby on the way – dammit, a baby you nearly lost.’

  She’d been kept in hospital overnight and then sent home, ordered to take things easy. She never said much about it. Thank God it was just a false alarm.

  I was eight months pregnant and huge. Jennie was only four months gone but still being sick, cramming herself with vitamins and pills for her swollen ankles. ‘This baby’s not right,’ she kept saying, ‘I just know it.’

  I hated to hear this mother’s curse. ‘Don’t say that, Jennie. The scan was fine.’

  ‘Scans don’t pick up everything.’

  As if she was willing it. More of that sadness pheromone.

  And if she was genuinely worried, why the hell had she agreed to put up that dismal crowd for Christmas? And if she lacked the confidence to say no, then Graham should have said it for her.

  I raised the subject with him, but his answer was predictably feeble. ‘If they don’t come here we’d have to go there, to the bungalow. And Jennie hates it.’ It seemed too revolutionary to point out that they didn’t have to spend Christmas with anyone.

  Of course, I invited them all to our party and for drinks on Christmas morning. Although we’d moved in only two years back, the tradition was already established.

  ‘I can’t bring them,’ groaned Jennie. ‘I can’t. They’d ruin everything.’

  ‘Well, leave them at home with the Bristol Cream and you and Graham come anyway.’

  This, however, was out of the question. ‘The height of rudeness,’ Stella would call it, ‘going off out and dumping us here as if you were ashamed.’

  ‘But,’ Jennie moaned, ‘it’ll tear me apart hearing the music and all that laughing and
me stuck inside playing Scrabble with that lot.’

  Someone had to make up her mind. ‘You’re bringing them over here. Sod it, there’ll be enough people to blot them out.’

  ‘They’ll go on about it afterwards – in a spiteful, mean way. They do when they see people having fun.’

  ‘Fucking hell, Jennie, that’s their problem. Don’t let them get to you like this.’

  But Jennie was fighting a split personality; her family knew her by her skirts and blouses, by her neatness, competence and earnest demeanour. There had been times when she’d worn her jazzy waistcoat, but even that had been known to raise eyebrows. In the last few months, however, in spite of being pregnant, she’d gone into jeans and skimpy tight skirts above the knee. She looked good. She looked like a gentler person. And once I saw a small hole in the heel of her black stockings! Around the house, too, she was less dutiful. Apart from this destructive obsession with me, she had begun to ease off and let go. Graham had acclimatized gradually, but her visitors would find the change shocking.

  ‘A week,’ she fretted. ‘All those puddings. And how can we fill seven whole days and pretend to enjoy ourselves? Help me, Martha, help me.’

  Any woman would sympathize. Somebody must do something soon to reduce Christmas back to two days and cut the rising suicide rate. There must be a ban on ‘Hark the herald’ until one week before, and no Teletubby adverts allowed.

  Christmas Eve.

  Jennie, Graham, Howard, Ruth and Stella were the first guests to arrive and, although I shouted at them from upstairs to help themselves, I knew damn well they wouldn’t. They’d be wandering round, or sitting expectantly, minding their manners, waiting to be served.

  ‘I couldn’t hold them back,’ hissed Jennie frantically. ‘It was fatal to tell them eight o’clock.’ Jennie suspected that this year Stella had surpassed herself and bought her daughter a new steam iron. Hints had been dropped. Ruth and Howard had pinned envelopes to the Gordons’ tree, book tokens for Jennie and Graham, a savings bond for Poppy.

  Damn. So I was forced to abandon my shower, and when I went down in my red kaftan – the outfit Sam borrows to play Father Christmas at the cricket club party – Jennie’s relations were sitting round the room in funeral-parlour mode. Paper plates were handed out, and food trays meant for picking at later, never designed to be lifted, were politely offered and accepted gravely.

  ‘Nice tree,’ commented Stella, casting an eye on our decorations, so straight away they looked degenerate, their brightness faintly savage.

  The atmosphere was catching. No matter how effervescent, guests met by this Stonehenge effect, boulders on chairs and refusing to mingle, were instantly subdued. Formal chatter began to predominate. Hell. I looked at Sam and shrugged my shoulders; booze should put a stop to all this.

  Jennie was knocking it back alarmingly and gin was known to go straight to her head. I understood her anxiety, but she had no need to blame herself. It was our party, we’d deal with it.

  In the end, Sam was forced to ask Jennie’s group to move. Their presence killed any spark of fun. ‘You might find it quieter and more comfortable to sit in the conservatory,’ he said, with what I considered admirable charm, and as their long faces moved away the tinsel and flashing bow ties went on.

  Poor Jennie – it was ‘Lady In Red’, combined with the magic-grotto effect in the playroom, that was her downfall. Earlier, in the afternoon, when Sam was stringing the fairy lights I’d warned him about the possibility of epileptic convulsions.

  Flitting around in my favourite role, it took me a while to twig that the same song was playing over and over, so off I went to investigate. There, in the playroom, swayed the drunken Jennie, tears rolling down her face, strap of her dress hanging immodestly and half of one tiny boob exposed. Lost in the mob of happy dancers, she floated, the dying fish in the tank.

  ‘ “Lady In Red” should be your song,’ said an old boyfriend of mine here with his large-buttocked second wife, while admiring my scarlet dress. My ‘Oh God, no’ must have surprised him. Could this be some meaningful message for me, or was it merely coincidence that Jennie kept playing this sloppy old song? Never before had anyone declared their love for me so romantically… The thought that Jennie might be doing just that was an excruciatingly toe-curling thought. I pointed a serious finger at Graham. ‘She’s had too much. She needs rescuing, right now.’

  But Graham was letting his hair down for once, and, as the music his wife kept playing became increasingly inappropriate, to my relief Sam said, ‘It’s OK, I’ll go.’

  That terrible family were still plonked there in the conservatory, putting a damper on the proceedings with their strained and courteous faces. While they stayed, the conservatory – a good room for resting – remained a no-go area. They were even demanding cups of tea. They refused to get off their arses. Bloody hell, why didn’t they go? Don’t tell me they believed that manners required they stuck it out till the end?

  Upstairs, Poppy and Scarlett slept through the racket like lambs.

  As it was Christmas Eve no-one stayed late, nobody wanted to spend the next day being sad and hugging the loo. Taxis arrived and the crisp air outside was snappy with calls and shouts.

  For the last hour Sam and Jennie had been smooching round the playroom, Sam innocently acting as hitching post for our helpless, drunken neighbour. That damn family were still sitting there and I wanted my bed, so I decided it was time I went to Sam’s rescue.

  Two couples shuffled round the now darkened room, oblivious to anyone but each other. But where the hell was Jennie, I worried. Had Sam abandoned her?

  He hadn’t. I found them upstairs together.

  ‘I put her to bed,’ he said quickly, standing, his hands clasped behind him. ‘She’s in no state to go anywhere. We can’t let that po-faced mob see her like this.’

  ‘I see.’ I felt vaguely unsteady. She looked like a crumpled doll spread on the bed like that, a well-loved tree fairy, dragged out every year for sentimental reasons. My heart knocked wildly when I asked Sam, ‘Wouldn’t it have been better – safer – if you’d called Graham or me?’

  ‘Safer? I did look for you. I couldn’t find you,’ Sam said. ‘And anyway, she’s heavy.’ My anxiety was misdirected. Sam had saved the day, this was no ‘other woman’. This was Jennie.

  So I sighed and let it go, replacing it with a yearning for hot scrambled eggs. ‘I’ll go and tell them she’s ill,’ I said, ‘but they’re bound to know she’s just pissed.’

  ‘God help her tomorrow,’ said Sam. ‘I wouldn’t like to be in her shoes.’

  ‘I wouldn’t like to be either,’ I agreed wholeheartedly.

  Of course, I know now that nothing went on, in spite of her later lies.

  Why did I ever trust her?

  NINE

  Jennie

  Why did I ever trust her?

  On and on, on and on. It was exasperating and wearying, not just for me but for Martha too. ‘What do you want from me, Jennie? If only I understood what you wanted,’ she’d say. All too often.

  I wished I could give her a straightforward answer. The closest I got was to mumble feebly, ‘I think I want to belong to you and be special like Scarlett.’

  ‘So what if I go along with this and tell you that you are special?’ said Martha with a sigh. ‘Would that make you feel any happier?’

  What a stupid question; unworthy of her. I shook my head. ‘You’d be playing games just to make me feel better.’

  ‘So I’m in a no-win situation,’ Martha said. ‘You’re allowed to play bloody games but I’m not.’

  Lawrence was born in January. A curly-haired monkey, and his baby-blue eyes soon turned a haunting black, like Martha’s and Scarlett’s. His body was wiry, like Sam’s. Having a son was important to Sam – fishing and football and all that stuff – and I wondered how he would have reacted if Martha had had another girl. Graham would be happy with either.

  Martha still smoked and drank, of course, an
d moaned about getting back to work, although how she could think about that with so much on her plate was beyond me.

  ‘It’s more important now, not less,’ she said from the depths of her squalid kitchen, trying on a purple home-made hat (she thought she might take her hats to the market and sell them) while she sipped gin and bitter lemon. ‘Alas, I could be dead, the world wouldn’t miss me. Sam says I’ve started to smell like a baby, all milk and turds. I am swamped.’

  I wished the birth was over for me, too. I thought I’d never forget my first ordeal, when I swore I would never go through this again. And yet, over time that memory had faded. But now it was back, vivid with pain.

  ‘You must have an epidural, Jennie. Forget about natural childbirth, it’s simply inhumane. You’re not a beast of the field, however else you despise yourself.’

  I had to agree.

  ‘And maybe,’ she said casually, ‘while you’re at it, you could ask the doctor about your depression – and everything else.’

  We didn’t know how to refer to it. ‘Everything else’ meant my obsession, but how could they put a stop to ‘love’, because that was the nearest comparison I could make. ‘If they could stop me, they’d be swamped by a horde of broken-hearted, would-be suicides clamouring for the same cure.’

  Martha disagreed. ‘This isn’t love,’ she said sternly. ‘I thought we’d been through this and decided. This is some kind of transference caused by a childhood trauma and, who knows, psychotherapy might bring it to the surface. For God’s sake, Jennie, it’s worth a try.’

  Martha had started making a rug ‘to stop my hands tearing at myself’, but it was more to do with giving up smoking. ‘For God’s sake, look at me,’ she went on, her rug-making tool behind her ear. ‘You’re not the only nutter round here and it’s all caused by being stuck at home.’ She was silent for a moment and still, before she suddenly exploded, ripped off her purple hat and said, ‘And I think Sam is seeing someone else.’

  I turned pink, gobsmacked. ‘Oh Martha, no! What makes you think that?’